This Week I'm the Guest Designer on The Next Level

My card won the challenge for week #2 of the wonderful new ezine challenge blog The Next Level. My prize was that I get to be guest designer for week #5 - that's this week. Here is the card I made for their very complicated sketch this week. The one thing that wasn't a challenge was that you had to sew on your card, which I have been doing for the past year. In fact, I can't make a card now without sewing on it - it just feels naked with no stitching!!

I wanted to pick a completely different theme for my card and had been yearning to do something beachy and tropical. I hit our one local scrapbook store and fortunately they had some very yummy paper by My Mind's Eye. I had to borrow the flamingo stamp from my sweet friend & SU demo Stasia and then dug out my stand-by hibiscus stamp from Stampendous.

The images were colored with Copic markers. The "bamboo" railing was cut with the Cuttlebug and Floral Borders die from a woodgrain pattered paper. I cut the large background circle with my Creative Memories cutting system. Since one of the requirements was sewing, I decided to use a fancy stitch. It was a real struggle with my sewing machine. I see some really beautiful fancy stitching on some cards which I love, but my machine just isn't up to that level. It was all I could do to get it to sew this stitch in a full circle and it wanted to tear holes in the paper.

The sketch called for a sentiment in the upper left corner so I made it a sun - can you tell it's a sun? I had to paper piece it by punching out some stars, cutting them up and gluing to the back of a circle. I glittered the rays as well as the hibiscus flower.